Department 56 Christmas Village Sets Are Worth the Cost: An Office Buyer's Total-Cost Argument

I'm the operations administrator at a 120-person B2B company, which means I buy everything from printer cartridges to the holiday decorations in our lobby. I've placed maybe 60 to 80 orders a year since 2020—through eight vendors, I'd say, though we consolidated to six in 2024. It's not a glamorous job, but I've learned exactly what happens to cheap things a year after you buy them.

Here's my hot take, and I know it sounds like I'm defending a luxury purchase: most offices waste their holiday décor budgets on decorations that are too cheap. Not inexpensive—too cheap. The stuff that's designed to look good for one season and then be replaced. In my role, I do not get to fall in love with a snowman figurine. I get to look at cost per use. And that math is why I now buy Department 56 Christmas village sets for our office.

The village building that made me do the math

When I inherited the office holiday shopping in 2020, our lobby had four light-up village houses from a big-box store. Each was about $40, and each was cute for exactly one December. By 2021, one was missing its chimney finial, a second had a cracked base from being packed in a plastic tote, and the third had started to look... not old. Just tired. Cheap glitter flocking is unforgiving after two winters.

I replaced them. A year later, I replaced one of the replacements. That's what I mean by too cheap: it wasn't a purchase, it was a subscription.

That same year, I made a more considered purchase. I bought one Department 56 Christmas Carol village building—the Victorian-era storefront with the lamp post cast into the corner—for $164. It felt reckless until I did the division. That building has now been through five setup-and-pack-up cycles in our office, plus two office moves, with not one chip. $164 divided by five Decembers is about $33 per season. If it lasts the 15 years pieces like this are built to last, it costs under $11 per holiday. I've paid more than that for a poinsettia that was dead by New Year's.

Now the confession, because I won't pretend the upfront price is the same. A typical Department 56 Christmas village set building runs from about $90 to $200 depending on size and detail (based on retailer listings I checked in January 2025; verify before you order). That isn't comparable to the $40 aisle, and I'm not going to insult your intelligence by saying it is. But the $40 houses weren't one-time purchases either, once you count replacements, the labor to re-style a half-broken collection, and the unhelpful message a fading plastic village sends to clients. What I mean is: the invoice price is not the total cost.

Why the Department 56 Christmas Carol village is the line I collect

Once I decided the lobby display was worth doing properly, I had to choose which line to build. That turned out to be the Department 56 Christmas Carol village: the Victorian shopfronts with snow on the roofs and warm windows. Put three of them together and you get a street, not a shelf display. Put out the little lamppost figure and people start telling each other holiday stories they hadn't thought about in years.

The budget trick is to treat it as a long-term project. We buy one or two pieces per year—sometimes around $100, sometimes $150 if we're adding a larger building. That's roughly the same annual money we used to spend replacing broken cheap houses. We just don't throw our old purchases away anymore, because there's nothing to throw away.

Department 56 has been in the collectibles business since 1976 (department56.com), and while I'm not telling anyone to treat décor as an investment—please don't—that history does mean these pieces were designed to be packed up, stored in an attic, and unpacked again. Someone has been testing that cycle for decades. That's the kind of reassurance an office buyer actually needs.

How to display a cross stitch (I learned by almost wrecking one)

Here is the part that sounds off topic. The most photographed item in our holiday lobby isn't the village and isn't the tree. It's a cross stitch made by our accountant's grandmother.

When she offered to lend it to the display, I hung it above the village table without thinking. Two winters of indirect window light faded the floss unevenly. Grandma's careful stitches, which had survived decades in a drawer, looked older after two months in our lobby than they had in thirty years. I felt terrible. What I mean is, I felt responsible.

So if you're wondering how to display a cross stitch properly, not just where to put it, here's the short version I learned from an $18 framing mistake:

• Press it before you frame it. Use a low iron on the back of the piece over a towel, then mount it on acid-free board. Pull the weave square, not drum-tight.
• Use acid-free matting. The fabric shouldn't touch the glass. Fibers hold moisture, and contact can cause discoloration over time.
• Use UV-protective glass. If any daylight can reach it, even indirect winter light, this is non-negotiable. It costs a little more; your floss keeps its original colors.

Once we fixed our mistake, the cross stitch went back above the village. It makes the whole display feel like a human celebration rather than a corporate decoration order. A village is collectible; the cross stitch is one of one. Both belong in the scene.

The smaller purchases that make the village look finished

The village alone can feel like a museum diorama, so we add two small things every year. The first is a dated crystal ornament on the little tree next to the village. It costs around $25, and over time the tree becomes a timeline of the team. Nobody remembers what we spent on tinsel in 2021. People remember the crystal ornament they hung the year they joined.

The second is a Department 56 home fragrance warmer on the sideboard behind the village. Open flames aren't allowed in our office, so a warmer with a wax melt is the only way to get a balsam-and-fir smell into the lobby without upsetting the fire marshal. It's a detail people don't consciously register—but they linger when a room smells like December instead of like floor cleaner. Lingering is the goal during our holiday open house.

The objections I would raise myself

If you're reading this and thinking it works for your office but not mine, you might be right. Let me answer the three objections I would make if I were on the other side of the budget spreadsheet.

That's a lot to spend on office decorations. It is, if you buy the whole village in one November. We don't. We add two or three pieces a year. Some years that's about $250; other years it's nothing. Over five years, it averages out to less than our old replace-the-failing-décor budget, because the old budget never got a year off.

Isn't this décor for retirees? That belief comes from an era when Department 56 was sold mainly through small gift shops with an older clientele, which was true 25 years ago. Distribution has changed a lot since then, and the licensed lineup now includes Disney, Peanuts, and Home Alone—names that pull in people in their twenties and thirties. Our intern spent ten minutes last December photographing the village to send to his friends. The audience didn't shrink; it changed.

Our office doesn't have a lobby, storage, or anyone who cares. Then ignore my advice. This approach works because we have a visible indoor spot, a closet for boxes, and two employees who enjoy decorating. If the display will sit in an empty hallway where nobody stops, or if no one will maintain it, cheap décor is probably the right answer. I can only speak to a corporate office context; retail display and residential decorating have completely different math. But if your situation matches ours, the logic holds.

So here's my real argument: not that every office should buy Department 56 Christmas village sets, but that offices should stop buying things designed to be thrown away. Add the village slowly. Hang a dated crystal ornament. Plug in a home fragrance warmer. Display a cross stitch properly, even if it's imperfect. Ten Decembers from now, the $40 houses will be in a landfill, and our labeled totes will still come down from the shelf—someone, maybe three employees later, will open them and immediately know the street. Cheap décor saves money only until you buy the second one. That's the whole argument.